01 June 2010

The Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 ended, today I returned home in the ugly but familiar city of Bucharest, grabbed myself a bag of nice strawberries and reserved some time to blog my conference conclusions. I'll do this using a few photos and useless ramblings.

First, I should acknowledge we officially proclaimed the secret Fedora lair in Brussels - no photos of it, since if I will tell you the location, I will have to kill you. All I can say, it is into walking distance (5 minutes) of the "Japanimantion" store and (10-15 minutes) of Delirium Cafe. Those wanting to know the exact location, have to perform the secret Fedora gangsta sign (hint: is not the "horns" sign, neither the "telephone" sign).

As I said, the place is awesome, it has a good price, good service, free Wi-Fi, a huge kitchen, breakfast included and so... it also has a shelf full of books... unfortunately most of them in French. I tried to use my bad French to read from one of them and my bad English to translate for the guys, but it was a massive FAIL, the got only the general idea.

As I said, I found nearby my new favorite place in Brussels, who dethroned Delirium Cafe from the top spot. And a few friends of mine are already craving for stuff from there and asking for my next trip:

It was also a perfect opportunity to reveal the homeless people of Fedora (how would you call other the guys eating fries from paper recipients on the stairs of a church?)

Speaking of Fedora, the truth is our talk was totally ruined by Hong Phuc Dang, who talked just after us and charmed the entire audience. Nothing could have surpassed her talk, probably not even Adobe opensourcing Photoshop and making it Linux-only:

LGM was also an opportunity to meet people, like the Argentinian Blender guy, with whom we discovered common friends:

Other interesting random encounters were with the guy from Morocco, who couldn't believe my blog is not written by a woman (!!!) and the Italian guy who talks almost perfectly Romanian:

From the backstage, I can show a "making of" photo of the group photo - yup, it was taken from the above;

My single complaint at LGM was the food: my stomach agreed with someone else I talked there, that green stuff was not food;

Surely, we were not perfect, I think our biggest failure was the inability to participate to the Fedora 13 release party in Belgium, which happened during the LGM, but in a different city, so we couldn't go there and back to Brussels, it was a missed opportunity (on the other hand, I was disappointed nobody from the local Fedora community attended LGM - I wrote on the Ambassadors list and blogged about it, hoping to raise interest).

In the end, I have to get serious and thank Red Hat. Fedora and Max for making the presence of the Desktop Team a reality, without this help it wouldn't happen.